Dr N. Awasthi (Neha)

As a Funded Programme Manager (One Planet Research Center)/Project leader (IMM), I aim to combine disruptive new biosensor technologies from various domains of natural sciences with latest chip and digital technologies for real life applications. I work with the Precision Health & Nutrition and Smart Food Processing & Environmental Sensing programs at OnePlanet.

One of my focus areas is bio-sensors for human gut health, the associated data infrastructure, and modeling tools to "measure" and understand the complexity of human microbiome. Our team SLIME (Sensor for the Living Intestinal Mucus Ecosystem) has been named the winner of the Faculty of Science's Team Science Award 2025.

I completed my Ph.D. at Duke University, Durham NC, USA in the field of computational materials physics in collaboration with Honda Research Inc., USA, investigating phase diagrams of transition metal catalyst nanoparticles for the growth of high purity single walled carbon nanotubes. Following this, I won the Dorothea Schlözer Research Fellowship at the Georg-August-University at Göttingen, Germany for postdoctoral research in theoretical biophysics. Here, I applied multi-scale simulation methods to investigate pore formation in lipid membranes to model the action of membrane-active peptides for drug delivery.

I have been a team member of the FNWI Interdisciplinary Research Platform (IRP) at Radboud University, NL, and project manager for two consortium projects in Artificial Intelligence, Green IT and Sustainability; a) EU project AI-Regio and b) Topsector Energy project Engineering Business Intelligence.